‘The entire deal for this much was negotiated and agreed before the first move to take it,’ insisted Charlie. ‘This was stealing to order; highly organized, highly sophisticated, highly professional.’ He’d suggested all that in his account to London. Almost nine o’clock there now. Alarm bells would have been sounded, the Director-General himself alerted. Maybe even the Prime Minister’s cornflakes had grown soggy by a breakfast interruption. Possibly not just as a result of his messages but additionally from Washington as well. Christ, they needed something from that bloody satellite! Charlie was particularly hopeful that Britain’s GCHQ – which during the Cold War worked in the closest cooperation with America’s National Security Agency – would have picked up something. He’d attached the highest priority to his request for London to pressure the Gloucestershire facility.
‘Whichever way it goes, it’s going to take a few days.’
‘Which means we’ve only got a few days to pick it up!’
‘Just like that!’
If they’d been talking face-to-face Charlie knew the other man would have snapped his fingers, to enforce his scepticism. ‘You happy to wave it goodbye, as it goes along the autobahn?’
‘Of course I’m not!’
Charlie managed to fetch more coffee from the canteen – but not to avoid spilling it during the journey – before Rupert Dean’s anticipated call. ‘What on earth’s happened?’
‘At the moment you know all that I do.’
‘They fully recognize the sort of crisis they’ve got on their hands; we’ve got on our hands!’
‘If not fully during the night they will by now.’ And Natalia would be in the eye of every storm, although not in the airless calm: tossed and buffeted between every responsibility-avoiding squall.
‘I’ve alerted GCHQ. Anything else you can think of?’
‘Not at the moment: I’m hoping for a lot more this afternoon.’ That was an exaggeration. Charlie didn’t know what to expect that afternoon.
‘I want to be updated immediately from now on, no matter what time of the day or night.’
‘Of course.’ Tiredness was at last pulling at Charlie, wiping his mind with moments of blankness. If the pale autumn sun hadn’t been vaguely visible through the window grime, he wouldn’t have known whether it was day or night.
‘I’m briefing the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister in an hour,’ disclosed Dean.
So there had been soggy cornflakes. ‘I’m not due back at the ministry for hours yet.’ Before which he hoped to get something about the satellite. Best not to promise what he didn’t have.
‘How is it locally with the Americans?’
‘No more problems: he’s settled down.’
‘You think they’ll share everything from the satellite?’
‘I don’t know. GCHQ might be a useful cross-check.’
‘I’ve met the FBI Director. I don’t trust him.’
Always expect the worst from people and you won’t be disappointed, thought Charlie: paramount personal survival rule. ‘I’ll be careful.’
‘Make sure you are. Get back to me as soon as you can. And to me, personally. I’m taking over direct control.’
‘Understood,’ accepted Charlie, happily. He was so deeply asleep, slumped precariously in his upright office chair, that it took several rings to awaken him and he actually dropped the handset in his delayed anxiety to pick the telephone up.
‘I think space technology is a wonderful thing, don’t you?’ greeted Kestler.
‘I’m looking forward to being convinced,’ said Charlie. He was glad he was awake when Saxon appeared at the door.
‘What the hell are you playing at?’ demanded the Chancellery head.
The creche arrangement had only been for one night so Natalia used the break in the continuous emergency meetings from Viktor Viskov’s chairmanship to that of the Interior Minister himself to extend Sasha’s care indefinitely. Radomir Badim took personal control around 8 a.m. after which it was always he or his deputy in direct radio communication with Kirov, denying Natalia any chance of speaking to Popov. With every exchange being automatically recorded, it could only have been an officially restricted conversation but Natalia, mind-fogged by lack of both sleep and any proper understanding of how the disaster could have occurred, was desperate just for the sound of his voice. A mid-morning crisis cabinet convened by the President gave Natalia the brief chance to sleep, which she did in Popov’s cot. It was more exhausted collapse than sleep and her last conscious thought was that when she woke up Aleksai would be back in Moscow: Badim’s last instruction had been to suspend the on-the-spot interrogation and return to the capital, with the prisoners, for a full debriefing that afternoon.
She awoke after only three hours, gritty eyed and aching, grateful there was a bathroom and shower adjoining her suite. She alternated the shower between hot and cold and got rid of some of the cramp but not all. The most important improvement was to feel absolutely clear-headed. She’d come the previous day with a change of clothes, expecting to be up most of the night although not for it to be as long as this, so she was able to change into fresh underwear and an uncreased, muted check suit. She critically surveyed her appearance in the full-length bathroom mirror not for her own satisfaction but for that of Aleskai, when he arrived. Bringing a change of clothes had been the best precaution, the shower completed the freshness and her face didn’t show the weariness of someone who had been up all night.
Charlie Muffin was very much an afterthought and nowhere in any reflection was how she might physically impress or appeal to him. Natalia didn’t want any more personal meetings with Charlie Muffin but she personally believed there was every reason to listen to the man professionally. She’d already experienced enough that morning to know what the agenda would be in the afternoon: it would be an inquest and inquests were always into the causes of a disaster, rarely to find a resolve for one. Only Aleksai had any practical, investigative experience, the knowledge and the expertise to know how to look forward, not backwards. Badim and Viskov and Vasilyev and Panin were bureaucratic politicians and the spetznaz officers were specialized soldiers and she was a former intelligence officer whose life had been spent trying to get inside people’s minds. Charlie Muffin was also a former intelligence officer but one whose life had been as far removed from hers as it was possible to be or to imagine. He’d always been operational, in the field: always expecting to be cheated, always prepared for the worst, always ready for the first prick of the knife in his back, literally or otherwise. In many ways, Charlie was more able than Aleksai, although she would never have admitted that opinion to either and was even embarrassed to think it herself.
Aleksai had always been governed by legal regulations, widely interpretive though they may have been. Charlie never had. In the name of his country – and therefore justifiably – he’d worked with only one remit. Get done whatever was required in whatever way was necessary and don’t get caught doing it. Charlie thought bad, never good. Which was how he’d think now because he didn’t know any other way to think. She’d recognized snatches of that instinctive rationale during that panicked discussion in the middle of the night. Which was why she’d successfully argued with the deputy Interior Minister for Charlie to be included. But that had been in the first minutes and the first hours of non-thinking panic and in the middle of the night. Now it was bright, clearer-thinking daylight. And there was a pass-the-parcel session – the parcel marked ‘responsibility’ – being conducted by the President himself. And shortly there would be arriving military commanders who’d been dumbfounded to find themselves not just facing Western civilians at a Russian military debriefing but Westerners with the impudence to question tactics and about whom Natalia was sure by now there would have been official complaints to the Defence Ministry. Whose minister would have been at the current cabinet gathering.